Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel [electronic resource] : Creature, Affect, Form /
Vermeulen, P.author.
This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.
Description based upon print version of record.
Cover; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: After-Affects; Genre dying into form; Fictions of agency; Emotion, literature, affect; Scope and scale; The novel, in theory; 1 Persistent Affect (Tom McCarthy, David Shields, Lars Iyer); Burying the novel; Tom McCarthy and the traumatization of fiction; Affect and superimposition in Remainder; Improper burials: affects of the real in David Shields' Reality Hunger; Lars Iyer: toward farcical life; 2 Abandoned Creatures (J.M. Coetzee); Fact, affect, fiction; After Disgrace: desire and the end of the novel; Creatural abandon
The rise of the novel and the domestication of creatural lifeThe author as creature: Slow Man; Exposure time: Diary of a Bad Year; 3 Cosmopolitan Dissociation (Teju Cole); Flights of memory; Cosmopolitanism, human rights, and the novel: Kant to the present; Fugue form and the monotony of noise; The aesthetics of the ""still legible""; The flâneur and the shadow of the fugueur; 4 Epic Failures (Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, Russell Banks); Lukács's contemporaneity; The revolution will not be novelized: Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions; Analog agency: Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document
Russell Banks's The Darling and the worlding of the post-9/11 novelCoda: The Descent of the Novel (James Meek); The scales of literature; On creatural war; Worldliness and creatural shame; Not sinking but descending: the affect of the present; Notes; Works Cited; Index
Includes bibliographical references and index.
This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.
Literature, Modern—20th century.
British literature.
Literature—Philosophy.
Culture—Study and teaching.
Literature, Modern—21st century.
Literature—History and criticism.
Twentieth-Century Literature.
British and Irish Literature.
Literary Theory.
Cultural Theory.
Contemporary Literature.
Literary History.